The U.S. Senate on Thursday significantly upped the amount the federal government can go into the red, increasing the debt ceiling to a record $14.3 trillion in a hardly relished party-line vote.

The measure came in a week of mixed signals about how serious lawmakers were willing to get in placing constraints on their own ability to spend.

In a series of votes Tuesday and Thursday, the Senate torpedoed a bipartisan debt commission and failed to approve mandatory limits on discretionary spending, but approved a significant constraint known as “pay-go,” which requires any new spending or tax cuts to be offset with taxes or cuts elsewhere in the budget.

“In a perfect world, we would have all of those votes be successful,” said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., who called the pay-go amendment — a version of which has already passed in the House — “a huge victory for the slow-moving Senate.”

Highest in U.S. history

“We’ve got debt at historic levels, and we can’t keep kicking the can down the road,” Udall said.

The debt-ceiling measure — which passed 60-39 — effectively increases the limit on the federal government’s credit card by $1.9 trillion, putting it at, by far, the highest level in the country’s history.

Failing to lift the debt ceiling would have forced a shutdown in government sometime in the next few weeks, crashing global financial markets.

Still, it was a politically tricky moment for Democrats.

A group of moderate senators demanded that the vote on the debt ceiling be accompanied by a vote on both the pay-go provision and the debt commission, which President Barack Obama promised Wednesday to institute anyway by executive order.

The track record of similar commissions — which in this case would make recommendations on debt reductions that would have to be adopted or rejected as a package by Congress — is spotty, and a presidential version would have even less power.

Adds budgeting “sanity”

Udall said moderate senators were finally persuaded to raise the debt ceiling after they got a letter from Vice President Joe Biden assuring them that Majority Leader Harry Reid would hold a vote on the executive commission’s recommendations.

“This is about as close as you can get to putting it into law,” Udall said.

Colorado’s other senator, Michael Bennet, applauded pay-go as a step to restoring “some sanity to the budgeting process,” while lamenting that the rules had not been even stronger.

Bennet also voted for the failed amendment limiting growth in discretionary spending over the next five years to a minimal amount. That prompted a slap by his likely Republican opponent, Jane Norton, whose campaign pointed out that Bennet voted against a similar amendment in April.

Bennet aides said the version that failed in April — when most Democrats voted against it — lacked “teeth” because it amended the budget resolution and that “he supported this particular amendment because it would actually have been enforced by law.”

A local union president slammed by Donald Trump on Twitter stood his ground Thursday, maintaining the president-elect gave false hope to hundreds of workers by inflating the number of jobs being saved at a Carrier Corp. factory in Indianapolis.